I was at Oundle in the mid-40s and it was tough. There were cold baths every morning and the food was awful. As far as I can see, the point was to produce people to run the British empire: if you could survive five years at public school, there was nothing the Kalahari desert or Antarctica could throw at you. Sex was part of the culture of the school, but it was all pretty ingenuous. It wasn't a culture of gang rape; it was boys getting crushes on other boys. It was like a ghastly parody of courtship, more to do with adolescent yearning than lust. Imagine it: 650 adolescents with nothing on their mind but sex who had to try to sublimate it all into playing rugger.

Peregrine Worsthorne

Writer and former editor, Sunday Telegraph

I think rapes certainly wouldn't have been called rapes. I have never been raped. There was a system of sexual favours [at Stowe], but they never happened with violence. A lot of buggery went on, and things in that area - but I don't think there was ever anything that brutal. These things are so difficult, and it's not unusual for people to exaggerate after the fact. In my view [the John Peel case] would have to be very much a one-off thing. There was a lot of homosexuality at certain periods in English public schools, but I've never heard of rape.

Derek Malcolm

Film critic

That sort of thing was very widespread. Not particularly at Eton, but at the schools that prepared you for it. I remember at my prep school there was a music master who fiddled with the boys. He once sat me on his knee in front of a class - we were listening to Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave - and he put his hand in my pocket and fiddled with me. In front of a class! And the other boys were actually laughing! We also used to have cold baths, and he would stand outside and tap each of us on the arse with a switch as we went in. There was another teacher, a good teacher and a very nice guy - he must have fiddled with somebody because he was suddenly expelled.

At Eton, if you were a fag master you chose the prettiest fag from among the lower boys. You just liked to have a pretty fag - I suppose it was a substitute for girls. The funny thing was, if you shagged one of the maids you were instantly expelled, but if you had anything to do with boys you got a severe ticking-off. And you hoped that by the end of your career at Eton you didn't turn out to be gay. Eton produced a lot of people who had John Peel's experience - mutual masturbation and all that sort of thing - but nobody was raped in my day.

Francis Wheen

Writer

I wasn't raped at Harrow, though oddly, long after I left, I noticed that various masters and ex-masters were being done for paedophilia. We had fagging at Harrow, but when I was a fag I was never propositioned. I'd love to pretend I knew about these things, but I didn't. I ran away at 16, but for entirely different reasons.

At my prep school, Copthorne, there was a fair bit of leaping in and out of beds in dormitaries, comparing notes, and general exploration. I was sexually molested by a gym master called Charles Napier, who was always putting his hand down boys' gym shorts. He eventually attained the giddy heights of a treasurer of the Paedophile Information Exchange. The only thing I can remember from Harrow is a story about a veteran physics master who, according to legend, found a couple of boys doing something in his house, and said, "I don't mind mutual masturbation, but I draw the line at buggery." It was quoted from time to time as a bit of an accepted rule.

George Melly

Jazz singer

It's not uncommon, I believe, to be chased at public school, especially if you're pretty. I was gay at school, so I had a lovely time. My school [Stowe] was tolerant, too - they didn't follow you about trying to catch you in flagrante. I rather enjoyed it all. If you're pretty - which I think John Peel probably was - either you become the school tart or you hate it and are very indignant about it. I was quite successful. I wasn't very pretty, but I made people laugh, which is a form of seduction.

Oliver James

Psychologist

I just missed - thank God - the Tom Brown's Schooldays era. When I was first at Eton, in the summer of 1967, it was still pretty authoritarian between senior boys and juniors, but that dissolved rapidly - certainly by the end of 1968. They abolished fagging not long after I left. You can only really talk about your own house, and in my case the headmaster was a very nice man. Any behaviour like that would have been unacceptable to him. Some heads would allow a more brutal regime than others.

When we got older, nearly all of us fancied boys who looked like girls, but I think it was pretty rare that anything actually happened - there was a curious platonic, romantic attitude. Having said that, I can think of at least three cases in which actual homosexual acts were performed. In one case it was a boy who liked doing mutual masturbation with other boys his own age. In another case it was an older boy and a younger boy, but there was no coercion. And there was one notorious case, again between an older boy and a younger boy, and I'm almost certain that too was non-coercive, and agreeable to the younger boy. Unfortunately they got found out, and the older boy got sacked. I think the house master got sacked pretty soon afterwards too.

Matthew Fort

Food writer

I was at Eton in the early 60s and enjoyed every minute of it. Fagging was still very much in evidence, the food was memorably disgusting, and I seem to remember being served at table by a sequence of Spanish men. No one tried to have sex with me. It may be that I was protected from older boys by having an elder brother at the school. I also had a spectacular outbreak of acne, which ran from one side of my brow to the other like the Himalayas. Relationships were going on, but it was less the love that dare not speak its name than the fact that if you put 1,200 testosterone-fuelled boys in an enclosed space there is bound to be some cross-fertilisation.